Only if we get the awesome song that they made for the MST3K version.
But Jaws does have nudity in the opening scene doesn’t it?
Looking it up on Youtube, we see her silhouetted from the back and side, so maybe the side-boob doesn’t count?
Well, thanks for that. I’m not getting that out of my head today.
That’s right, share my private hell!
I finally watched The Empty Man. It’s a fantastic 20-minute horror short about some kids backpacking in the mountains of Bhutan, followed by a boring-ass full length feature film about a ridiculous urban legend and some nonsense. I was really hyped up to like it after the prologue, but man does it disappoint. Basically nothing happens for the entire movie, then there’s a twist/reveal that makes no sense, then it ends. My review: ugh.
If you missed the connection of the rest of the movie to the first 20 minutes, it’s probably covered by most reviews. You might want to look to at least understand what happened, though it may not change your mind.
I understood the story in The Empty Man just fine. It’s not hard. I agree with @JoshL and others. That first sequence in the mountains is an almost pitch-perfect horror short. The rest of the movie is a tryhard goulash of bits from other movies that almost gels, broken up by one outstanding scene with the kids in the woods.
I wouldn’t call it a movie about an urban legend in any meaningful sense. It presents as that sort of movie on a surface level but it leaves that behind pretty quick and has much more interesting things in mind. IMO, of course. Still sticks with me months later, probably my favorite horror movie all year. And not because of the opening, which is pretty rote horror movie, in my book. Not bad, certainly, but not half as interesting as what comes later, and it does take forever to figure out what it has to do with the rest of the movie.
Oh, I got it, I just didn’t care anymore. Just like the fact that we’re supposed to care about this guy’s tragic past, even though we were just told that it doesn’t actually exist? Not that that makes any sense at all anyway.
This is just a rather difficult hurdle to get over, isn’t it? It renders everything moot (and everything to this point is, at best, a patchwork of ideas that aren’t fitting together).
I would go so far as to say it’s trivial, despite the movie’s attempt to one up Hell House LLC 2 on that front (side note: it fails miserably).
The Hunted - this was written and directed by Josh Stuart, who is most famous to me as being a dude who has played recurring rolls in various procedurals over the years (including AJ Cook’s character’s eventual husband in Criminal Minds). It’s about two brothers keen to launch a new hunting series who head out into West Virginia and then [ghosts 'n shit].
It’s decently shot (mostly) and acted, but it’s just rote formula. And occasionally incoherent in the direction of the “action”. The Conjuring -1 (or -2) if you will. I’ve seen worse. Seen better. Wouldn’t recommend except to people who are diehards for “out in the woods”/survival horror.
I think this is the central disconnect - if you feel that the reveal renders the rest of the movie pointless, then yeah, it’s not going to work for you. I don’t think it does anything of the kind, personally.
I’m not wild about the end twist with The Empty Man, but I did appreciate that it continued zigging and zagging rather than settling into your typical “teenagers awaken supernatural entity and die one-by-one” form.
But that opening is fantastic. Even if you shut it off immediately after, it’s worth putting on for that.
The ending doesn’t ruin/make the movie not work for me. The movie itself did that before we got to the ending. It’s more insult to injury.
So I watched a movie called Held. Why did I watch this movie? I gotta tell a little story.
In December 2019, I was at a gathering in L.A. It was mostly people I didn’t know, or only knew online, or had just met. Some of you were there, and know what gathering I’m talking about.
Anyway, at one point I was talking with a group of people, and one of them was a young lady named Jill Awbrey who was talking about a movie she’d just completed filming named Held. She wrote it, and she made a deal with the studio that produced it that she got to star in it. I thought that was pretty cool, she’s making a career for herself. So anyway, I filed that title away in my mind to check out when it was released.
Then of course, the pandemic happened and the movie kind of vanished. According to IMDB, it had a theatrical release in April 2021 and made $42k in its opening weekend, and $142k total gross. It doesn’t say what the budget was. I watched it on Hulu.
Ok, so was it any good?
It is actually pretty good. It presents itself as a sort of bog-standard home invasion thing, but it has a really well-done twist that elevates it quite a bit above that. It makes good use of the setting. The pacing is about perfect (the movie runs 90 minutes and does not waste your time). At first the characters act in a way that seems unbelievable or unrealistic… but… it all works out in the end.
The high point of the movie, for me, is the presentation of the control room (that is a spoiler, I guess, but not much of one). Whoever was the set designer/decorator for that room should get at least two Oscars.
Anyway, I hope Jill Awbrey is still writing and making deals for herself out there!
Come Play (2020) - This may be the quintessential Zoomer/Gen Alpha garbage horror movie. Let’s check off the points, shall we?
- The monster is a Slenderman-ish CG “scary” skinny boogeyman
- Gillian “Community” Jacobs as the mom
- Hipster darling John Gallagher Jr. as the dad
- A son afflicted with the magic kind of autism known only in Hollywood
- A morality lesson about screen time and loneliness
- Lots of use of Instagram face apps
- Repeated use of a tryhard “scary” children’s story
- Monster rules that were inconsistent and made zero sense
The only thing missing was a cameo from a YouTube influencer. Pass. I will give it one point for having a school bully turn out to not be such a bad person and have the most character development.
Has anyone watched all of midnight mass on Netflix yet? I’ve watched 2 episodes that were incredibly slow, and would be interested in hearing if it gets any better.
My suspicion based on Mike Flanagan’s previous Netflix shows is that if you are impatient with the lovely character building and focus on the relationships of the various townsfolk and just want to get to some spooks and people getting murdered, you are watching the wrong show. That said, it is certainly escalating.
(I can’t give you an assessment of the whole show, sorry. Hopefully by tomorrow. I’m jonesing for more.)
I saw Dave Franco’s The Rental and it’s really just sorta weak-willed and disappointing.
You open with these four urban tech folks heading to the Oregon coast for a weekend before they…raise more money or something? Anyway, they are stressed, and there’s various tensions among them. The two partners are a man and a woman who are not a couple, but their closeness makes you think they should be, and then there’s their respective partners. That’s the pot that starts simmering, and it boils over pretty soon, and various other threads start to get knotted in, and about 1/2 way through I was thinking, hey, maybe this is moving slowly, but we’re gonna get to some fun crunchy shit as it all hits the fan at the same time, oh, and also there’s something creepy going on with maybe cameras in the house or something? Something isn’t just off with them, it’s the house, too, and the caretaker, who may be racist, annnnnnnnnddddddd…
Then it turns into My First Horror Movie and it’s just not very well done at all. There’s a coda that’s supposed to be nihilistic, I think? But it doesn’t really work.
The only thing I think could make sense is the filmmakers saying “Random murder will make all your personal drama and humanity and plans for your life mean nothing, and isn’t that sorta crazy?” Which is like, student film level boring.
If they’d stuck with the first half and followed through on that, it could have worked, but they swerved into something else that just doesn’t. Meh.
The coda was creepier than the rest of the movie for me, but I agree that the build-up was a lot more promising than the pay-off.